Magnetic Field Disambiguation

The vector magnetic field inferred from measurements of Zeeman induced polarization in spectral lines suffers from and inherent 180 degree azimuth ambiguity. This renders two possible formal solutions for the magnetic field vector at each spatial position of any particular data-set. Solving this ambiguity is a requisite to further exploiting the data. However, it is an ill-posed problem, since it requires knowing quantities that are typically not constrained by observations (i.e. the variation in height of the three components of the magnetic field). A suite of methods that use different assumptions and approximations has been developed to tackle the disambiguation problem. CSAC offers links to a few community disambiguation tools here.